Stellar
Finding a voice
for a voiceless
community.
hire at Stellar
Joined in early 2018
years across community
and marketing
people in the organization
Company context across my tenure.
Five and a half years.
01 / The chapters- 01
First three months
The 11th hire.
At the end of 2017, I began talking with Stellar’s Head of Growth about joining as Director of Community. I started in early 2018 as the 11th hire. I had worked in content marketing, art direction, and copywriting, and spent years managing micro-communities and participating in early crypto communities. My first three months were mostly audits: messaging platforms, data, and the people already active in the community. I also produced the monthly newsletter and ran the social channels.
- 02
The remit expands
A marketing team of one.
Three months in, the Head of Growth left and I was the sole member of the marketing team. I began planning campaigns, developer programs, and marketing strategy. I traveled the country organizing Stellar meetups and presenting features of the protocol, then hired a small team to support content.
- 03
Director of Marketing
A growing team.
By the end of my second year, I helped with the hiring of a permanent CMO. I moved into the Director of Marketing role, working on content, lead generation, documentation, and conference planning while continuing to manage community. I led three content marketing specialists and three designers, with responsibility for campaigns, budgets, quarterly planning, performance analysis, and outside vendors.
02 / What stayed
The programs
we built.
I created and led developer-onboarding programs, including the Stellar Community Fund and RPCiege, that engaged 1,000+ developers. During my tenure, SCF distributed the equivalent of $6 million in grants, paid in XLM. I stayed at Stellar for five and a half years, as the organization grew from 11 people to more than 150.
Audience growth across my tenure: Reddit 105K → 212K, Twitter/X 275K → 750K, and YouTube 4K → 12.2K.
Newsletters and guides.
03 / PublishingThe monthly newsletter was one of my first responsibilities at Stellar. This archive includes an edition with community updates, articles, and events, plus a two-page illustrated guide to the network.
Meridian.
04 / MeridianConference planning was part of my work as Director of Marketing. These are archived websites for Meridian, Stellar’s annual conference. The 2020 edition was a free virtual event with speakers from inside and outside the Stellar ecosystem.
Explore Meridian 2020
Learning through a game.
05 / RPCiegeRPCiege was a developer-onboarding program built around fantasy skirmishes. Players worked through Rust and Soroban coding challenges and earned packs of digital collectible cards for completing them.
There was a rulebook, a cast of collectible characters, and films introducing the challenges. For the second round, Midnight Madness, the setting moved into monster-movie territory: ghouls, zombies, werewolves, and new puzzles. The cards, packaging, films, and website captures are below.
Read Stellar’s RPCiege story
Animated card collection / 10 films
Packaging, posters & campaign material
The booklet & web archive
The original booklet brings the game’s story and Soroban challenges together. Web captures preserve the campaign and skirmish pages.
Community programs.
06 / Programs & campaigns
Program website captures are reference material; they may include updates made after my tenure.